On 17/01/2008, KANZAKI Masahide <mkanzaki@gmail.com> wrote:
> yep, you can think, for example, an Wikipedia page as a Subject Indicator.
>
> :me a foaf:Person; foaf:interest wikipedia:Semantic_Web .
> wikipedia:Semantic_Web foaf:primaryTopic concept:Semantic_Web .
>
> => :me foaf:topic_interest concept:Semantic_Web .
>
> In a sense, foaf:interest uses the object document as *an* indicator
> of the subject(URI of such document is a Subject Identifier). And a
> (P)SI can indicate the subject by using an IFP such as
> foaf:primaryTopic.
>
> So we can almost think that an Wikipedia page is an PSI, except it
> doesn't satisfy the last requirement of PSI: "A Published Subject
> Indicator must explicitly state the unique URI that is to be used as
> its Published Subject Identifier" (3.1.3 in spec).
This is a clean way to define the identifier without creating a new
standard, other than the ontology. Of course, there is no need to
intrude on wikipedia, as it has its own interests at heart and holds
no claims to keep consistent URI's or to keep articles at any of their
URI's. DBPedia seems like a better option for overlaying the knowledge
in wikipedia with semantics.
I speak mainly because there are some editors on wikipedia who would
prefer not to have semantic markup on pages because it makes them ugly
(equating wikipedia's infoboxes to semantic content here), and is
possibly incorrect (philosophy of not publishing anything till it is
perfect and correct), and there is nothing a group of outsiders can do
to change their point of view it seems.
Wikipedia also does not create concepts until there is a sufficient
amount of "reliably published" information about them, and if they are
of no interest to people outside of the immediate community. This
leaves it closed to new information, so semantics can't grow within
its vocabulary framework, and there can never be a proliferation of
identifiers which are not going to be used outside of a small interest
group. An equivalent wiki somewhere based on a specific interest area
could go past the second restriction easily, but may still need to
hold onto the first restriction otherwise it may be seen as
unreliable.
I would be inclined to keep the new and constantly changing
identifiers within an organisations intranet-wiki and then publish
their relationships to outside identifiers when they become
accepted/published/interesting to outsiders.
Peter Ansell